Investment Firm 
NEED: Obligated to change 100s of service account credentials
PROBLEM: Could not keep track of service accounts and their password updates
SOLUTION: Automate service account management to make every service account a one time password
“We have hundreds of service accounts. They run services on our Windows servers, and can be hard-coded into systems. According to our internal IT audit agreements, we are obligated to change the password on all of these accounts.”
“When you add up several hundred service accounts, the time and coordination needed to change a single password is overwhelming. We were drowning. And that’s before even considering the security ramifications of having people know the password of accounts with elevated privileges. We needed to limit that risk.”
“With Rapid Enterprise Defense (RED) Identity Management no one, including IT personnel, knows the passwords for these accounts.”
“Let’s say I deploy a server and need a service account named ‘security service’. I don’t know the password for security service. Only RED Identity Management knows it. As an authorized user, I can access the password when I need it to make repairs or configuration changes. RED Identity Management audits my use of the account. It then rerandomizes the password after use, so it really makes every service account a one time password.”
– Vice President, Information Security
To learn more about how RED Identity Management can help with the challenge of managing your service accounts, please visit our Service Account Management page.
Federal Credit Union
NEED: To secure service accounts
PROBLEM: Could not find all the service accounts and where they were used
SOLUTION: Automatically discover and safely change service accounts
“We needed to secure our service accounts. They were too intertwined across the enterprise for us to update the credentials by hand. You’re talking about a lot of servers that each have multiple service accounts. If you’ve got one service dependent on four others that are all running on the same password, you’ve got to stop them all, change the password, and then restart them in the correct order. So the service accounts were essentially untouched. And the auditors noticed.”
“With RED Identity Management we no longer have to manually stop and restart each service when we update the passwords. To find where all service account passwords exist and update each of them would take a good two to four weeks per change – and that’s assuming you succeeded in locating them all.”
“It’s like painting the Golden Gate Bridge – starting at one end, working your way to the other end, and then starting all over. Essentially by the time you were done changing service account passwords, you would have to start all over all again. RED Identity Management automates that tedious, error-prone process for us.”
– Information Security Analyst
For more details on how RED Identity Management can help manage your service accounts see our Service Account Management page.
Law Firm
NEED: Manage service accounts
PROBLEM: Service account credential changes caused outages
SOLUTION: Track all service accounts and successfully change their passwords
“We were in a situation where we had some runaway service accounts. No one in our IT department seemed to know anything about them. But they were active and had lots of permissions associated with them. We needed a way to deal with the service accounts, in a short amount of time and in an efficient manner, if we ever had to hit the panic button. We had a lot of problems. Essentially, we would change a service account password and see what broke. Then we’d fix it.”
”We deployed RED Identity Management and it confirmed what we were thinking – you don’t know what you don’t know. By that, I mean there’s no way to locate all of the service accounts and their dependencies in a large environment, unless you’re using RED Identity Management. With RED Identity Management, our privileged credentials changes take a fraction of the time we once spent on this task. RED Identity Management reduced the time to manage the service accounts in our enterprise by 90%”.
– Manager of IT Infrastructure
Life Insurance Underwriter
NEED: Change service account passwords frequently
PROBLEM: Manual process burdensome
SOLUTION: Automate the randomization of service account passwords
“We had two use cases for RED Identity Management. One was the workflow request for administrative use. When checking out root and/or administrative passwords, we needed to have audit logs showing that the request for access was approved, authorized and the person only used it for the reason they needed it.
The second use case was the need for automating the changing of passwords across service accounts. We have to change our service account passwords pretty frequently. RED Identity Management really does that well. It randomizes the passwords on a frequent basis, which is perfect.”
– Director of Cyber Security
To learn more about how RED Identity Management can help you with the challenge of managing your service accounts, please visit our Service Account Management page.